YouTube – Typography from Vancouver Film School.

(from a group of excellent of examples of kinetic type compiled by Garr Reynolds)

Seth’s experience of trying to talk to someone about his broken Kettle has got NOTHING to trying to talk to Rogers.

• While surfing, I get a message saying that I am near my bandwidth limit for the month. I don’t know when my billing date is, so I’m not sure how bad this is. Clicking on the “monitor your bandwidth” link brings me to a login page.

• I have a Rogers book with my account info, but I can’t work out the username and password for this page.
• I read through the book for clues. There is information about logging in to the rogers.yahoo.com site and information about how to check your account once there.
• I know that information, so I log in.
• I find a billing section but have trouble finding usage info.
• Help centre search returns lots of results none of which have to do with my question.
• On the billing page, I find a link to monitor my bandwidth.
• Clicking on it brings me to a new login page.
• I enter the username and password that worked before. It does not work here. They want a different username and password. I still have no idea what this is.
• Luckily, they give me a 1 877 number to call for assistance. I call it.
• A recording tells me that THE NUMBER I AM CALLING IS GOING TO BE DISCONTINUED. Then it repeats the message in French. Then it transfers me to the right number.
• I have to go through the voice recognition menu (pro tip – speak gibberish until it gives up and gives you a human).
• The human tells me my billing date, so I’ll know when the usage limit resets.

Why, oh why couldn’t the process have been

• While surfing I get a message saying that I am near my bandwidth limit for the month and it will reset on [BILLING DATE GOES HERE]?

Every step of the way was clearly designed by people with institutional needs in mind instead of customer experience.

• Why can’t I actually look at my billing through the roger.yahoo.com account info page?

• Why do I need to create a new login and password to view my rogers information?
• Why didn’t my account book COME with a login and password (at least Bell gets this much right).
• Why does their web page send you to a soon-to-be-discontinued phone number?
• Why doesn’t the old 1-877 number just silently route you to their new phone system? How much can it possibly cost to maintain more than one points of entry?

I’m sure there are reasonable answers to each of these questions, having to do with how the architecture of the user authentication systems relate to various protocols. I don’t care. All I know is that I spent 20 minutes trying to find a very simple answer to a very simple question.

(I will say that the actual dude I talked to was very helpful and quick with the answers. So top marks for hiring him. But he’s only a part of the service. I hate how long it took me to get to him.)

News You Can Lose: Financial Page: The New Yorker.

Surowiecki opens with some interesting ruminations about why newspapers are going down. Then, he goes crazy and lays the blame at the feet of the greedy consumer who wants it all for free! The bastards! Soon we’ll get what we pay for!

Here’s the dirty secret of newspapers: For a very long time, most of the content has been crap. Read your local newspaper lately? Remember why you stopped?

Most papers are a strange mix of not-that-great local reporting and columnists mixed with repackaged wire feeds and syndicated content, paid for by bundled advertising. Most of the news in local papers isn’t. At least, isn’t worth paying for. It’s nice that you won the county fair, but it probably doesn’t need to be in my paper. A newsletter for people who care about fairs would be better.

We’re not losing original reporting, we’re losing the middle men that bundled all the content together. Good riddance.

We don’t need to worry about the future of newspapers, we need to worry about the future of reporters. Will there be business models that allow individual or small teams of quality investigative journalists to earn a decent living while also breaking important stories? Will the class of amateur and semi-pro reporters be able to fill in any gaps?

So many redundancies in reporting and news. Do we need dozens of variations on the sports page? How many film critics do we need? How many reporters does it take to cover a press conference? More than zero, but probably less than we have right now.

Content creators in most other industries are going through the painful process of changing the way that they charge for their content, finding some equilibrium between giving a way their stuff for free to attract fans and charging for specialized, related or premium versions. Here’s my non-bold prediction: News reporters will have to do the same.

Cartoonists can survive the death of paid syndication, surely the important content can as well.

photo credit: striatic

Dan Barber’s story (embedded above) is one of my favourite kinds of stories. He begins with something that seems unethical, tells the story of an unlikely maverick who challenges the status quo and wins (a contest). All the while, it turns out that our maverick’s approach involves some down home ingenuity and hands on sustainability. In the end, it turns out that we get to have our cake and eat it to. There is a method for producing foie gras ethically that’s also sustainable (AND DELICIOUS). (If only we didn’t have those evil unsustainable, unethical factory farms that gave us slightly inferior foie gras (and strawberries and mangoes and whatever) year-round.)

At about 8:15 in, Barber unwittingly raises the first issue that will cause massive problems for this kind of farming. He approvingly mentions that the farmer is taking a loss on feeding these geese figs and olives. “The doubly irony is that on the figs and olives, Eduardo could make more money selling those than he can on the foie gras.”

At which point the economist in me asks, “then why does he bother with the foie gras?”

Eduardo is an artisan farmer, he doesn’t need to be profit maximizing, just profitable. So if he wants to take some extra time and effort, he’s welcome to destroy value in the goods he produces as a kind of hobbyist craftsman. That’s fine for him, but does it work on a world-wide scale?

The reason that Eduardo could make more on the figs and olives than he does on the foie gras is that someone has figured out how to make the delicacy more cheaply. It’s far from ethical – it requires factory farming and force feeding – but when it comes to foie gras, people don’t seem to care.

The pricing of foie gras really doesn’t matter to most people, but the same story plays out over and over again in the world of farming. Factory farms produce food more cheaply, with less labour and at a higher density than most organic farms. They also produce the food people want year-round instead of seasonally. They do it at massive environmental and ethical cost, but until there is a price on these things, it is unlikely that entreating people to only eat what is in season will see a shift in the way food is produced.

There’s two ways this story can get better. Either factory food becomes more expensive or sustainable food becomes cheaper.

Eliminating the massive subsidies paid to factory farmers would be a big step in doing both at once. If oil continues to climb, factory farm prices will tend to rise (a lot of oil goes into the machinery and pesticides used on larger farms) making less oil-dependent farming more viable.

The labour issue is a bigger one, which must be solved either by automating organic farming practices, killing western subsidies which will make farming profitable for developing countries (they have a surplus of labour, but ultra cheap grain and dairy from subsidized OECD farmers often forces them out of business), or convincing more OECD citizens to go back to the land.

The last question, to which I don’t know the answer, is: Will organic farming produce enough food to feed everyone? The technologies that underlie the Green Revolution allowed the human population to triple in less than 70 years with very few major famines. Advocates of alternative farming need to account for whether their methods will sustain the human population (or who should die).

They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.

–Norman Borlaug

Environmentalists who want to get punched? Gift givers who want their friends to take a hint about their sanctimonious attitude? Clueless people?

Take special note of the price. If you can’t read it, that’s $12.99.

I bought my reusable bags for $2 and I didn’t have to be an asshole to ANYONE.